A team three students from Okanagan College’s Computer Science program placed second out of 74 teams nationally and an impressive 125th of 2,200 teams globally at the IEEEXtreme 10th annual student programming competition.
OC students Kevin Hall, Brody Travis and Martin Wallace formed team Unstumpable, which along with four other teams from the OC, battled sleep deprivation and students around the world in the 24-hour virtual coding competition put on by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), which is the world’s largest association of technical professionals.
“We had a strategy going in as to how we would approach each question and we communicated well as a team,” explained team Unstumpable member Kevin Hall.
“We started off strong and were in the top 15 worldwide after the first few questions, but the lack of sleep definitely impacted our problem-solving abilities.”
The contest, which transpires simultaneously worldwide, challenges teams of students to work collaboratively to solve a series of programming problems that are released over the duration of a day.
The four other Okanagan College teams placed 22, 25, 46 and 52 in Canada.
The College’s IEEE student branch grew out of a response to the increasing number of Computer Science students and the thriving tech industry in the Okanagan. The branch provides learning opportunities and financial support for competitions such as IEEEXtreme, which are an important practical application of their studies.
Work demand is high in the Okanagan’s $1.3B technology industry, which is growing at 15 per cent per year, according to Gopal. Accelerate Okanagan’s job board has about 75 open jobs at technology enabled companies available at any given time.
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